My grandma archives food. Her pantry contains foods which literally expired last millenium. She fills her freezer chests with unlabeled takeout containers, desserts from Trader Joe's, and half-full slush drinks from Starbucks/Costco/Jamba/etc. I am unsure whether to consult Marie Kondo, an archaeologist, or a priest. True story: my wife once found a cat in her great aunt's refrigerator. They loved that cat but couldn't find the time to cremate its remains. Today is May 18, 2026. This i...

It’s common and correct to say that “all code is technical debt”. Adding code is a necessary evil for developing new features: you almost always have to do it, but each line of code adds to the complexity and maintenance burden of the system. All future changes to the system have to work with the existing code, or at least avoid breaking it. Once systems accumulate enough code, they become impossible for a single person to understand: instead of reading the code and understanding what it...

The University of Cambridge scored a perfect 100 out of 100 in the Financial Times Best Employers 2026 ranking, topping a list of 500 UK companies drawn from over 200,000 employee evaluations. Three separate major rankings now cover the best companies to work for in UK 2026, each relying on direct employee feedback rather than corporate submissions. This article breaks down who topped each list, which industries dominate, and what the data says about UK workplaces right now. Best Companies to...

The second episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 2, I chat with Alexandra , the author of xandra.cc , a founder and barista at the 32-Bit Cafe . We talk about, among other things, building indie web communities, communicating the possibilities of having a personal website to new audiences, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. 32-Bit Cafe The second episode of Wonders...

I had a picnic this weekend and at it I gave Phil a pen plot that I had been meaning to for a while: I want to explain it here because I think it's cool! This was drawn with a pen plotter, which is a kind of robotic arm that you can place a pen in, and program to draw very precisely. The result is that you can get crisper lines, that were drawn with a pen instead of inkjet (which also means you can get different kinds of inks). As a piece of art, what I like about it is that while its st...

EDIT: of course this was already done in the past! I had little doubts but people just confirmed me about it on Twitter :) But, keep reading: the CRC32 compromise at the end is an interesting tradeoff, and this is a good discussion to have in general. Right now I'm working to an agent for my DS4 project. Local inference is token-poor, it's a battlefield where optimizations count. I was quite surprised by the fact the EDIT tool everybody is using right now forces the LLM to emit the old versio...

How cmd/go's script tests led me to testscript, and how to use it for CLI tests that exercise argv, stdout, stderr, exit codes, and scratch files. How cmd/go's script tests led me to testscript, and how to use it for CLI tests that exercise argv, stdout, stderr, exit codes, and scratch files.

Are these weeknotes? Yes they are! Will I do them again next week? Who knows!  Sunday 10 May: Got home from hospital shift around 7:30pm. Exhausted, hangry. Walked into a clean tidy home, flowers and cards, and the kids cooking dinner (spring roll bowls which were so so so good). Plus! a NEW CHAIR for the balcony. We ate and talked and did that thing where you laugh so hard you cry. Then I sat on my new balcony chair & had some nice bourbon while they cleaned everything up. Anyway it was a...

Dimster = DIMensional teSTER for Apache Kafka On GitHub: https://github.com/dimster-hq/dimster Most of my career in distributed systems has been as a tester, performance engineer and formal verification specialist. I’ve written performance benchmarking tools in the past, for RabbitMQ and Apache Pulsar but in recent years I’ve used OpenMessagingBenchmark (OMB) to run benchmarks against Apache Kafka and other messaging systems. But OMB is hard to deploy and has several limitations compared to...

Today at Google I/O, Google released Gemini 3.5 Flash . This one skipped the -preview modifier and went straight to general availability, and Google appear to be using it for a whole lot of their key products: 3.5 Flash is available today to billions of people globally: For everyone via the Gemini app and AI Mode in Google Search For developers in our agent-first development platform Google Antigravity and Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Android Studio For enterprises in Gem...

At NAB, I found a demo of Wi-Wi STAMP , a wireless time synchronization protocol that came out of Japan's NICT . Wi-Wi stands for Wireless 2Way interferometry, and it uses the 900 MHz band for picosecond-level time sync, and mm-level distance accuracy, in a tiny box, currently the size of a smartphone. The system is still in development, but existing prototypes have 20ps of phase synchronization jitter, and time synchronization down to 30ns. The next generation will have time down to ...

In May 1886, American railroads completed the largest coordinated industrial operation the country had seen. Over two days, work crews across the South pulled up thousands of miles of track and relaid it three inches closer together, converting the region’s idiosyncratic gauge to match the rest of the country. The process was planned, organized, and executed in less time than most tech companies take to schedule a product launch. The southern railroads had resisted this change for decades be...

“Well, I’ve made up my mind, anyway. I want to see mountains again, Gandalf.” ― The Lord of the Rings Wānaka is a smaller, less commercialized resort town compared to Queenstown , with a population of around 13.000, but it's as exciting. On my way to Wānaka, I've had a quick stop at the Crown Range Lookout , which offers an amazing view over the Queenstown area — especially during the golden hour. Once reaching a cozy hostel in Wānaka, I was greeted by a fitting na...

I just got back from a three and a half week trip to Japan. It was the longest trip I have ever been on (aside from studying abroad in Germany, which felt different). I made the following wild circuit with only a backpack and a duffel: Tokyo Toyama Kanazawa Nara ish Ito Hakodate Nikko Mashiko Karuizawa Tokyo This trip was split into three parts: time with my immediate family, going to a conference, and then time with my partner. They were all great...

I recently added tags to my blog using BERTopic and a mix of LLMs. You can see the tags in the sidebar to the right (or in the footer on mobile). I’ve done this before in 2023, with GGUF Mistral using llama-cpp, but never finished the project. Now, because the models have been getting so good, and my project was small, relatively well-defined, and easy to evaluate, the project took me about 6-10 hours over a month, using BERTopic, Claude Code, and Pi with Deepseek. Why so many different AI...

https://austinhenley.com/blog/academiastartupsbigtech.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/academiastartupsbigtech.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/academiastartupsbigtech.html

Birgitta Böckeler adds discussion of three more sensors for static code analysis, focusing on checking and enforcing better modularity. Computational sensors for dependency checks were good at enforcing rules, but the rules were limited. Building a computational sensor for coupling data proved lackluster. Prompting an inferential sensor to review modularity was more effective. more… Birgitta Böckeler adds discussion of three more sensors for s...

WASHINGTON (May 19, 2026 ) — Shield AI, the defense-tech company building state-of-the-art autonomy software and aircraft, today announced that the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering (OUSW R&E) has selected Shield AI to integrate its Hivemind autonomy software onto the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) , a new class of low-cost, one-way attack drones often referred to as kamikaze drones designed to operate in large numbers. The LUCAS program, d...

This is how I start new blog posts: $ ./new.sh permalink-for-new-post This sends a command to Hugo, the static site generator I use, to create a new file with that permalink, and generate the requisite front matter (dates, default categories, etc). It also derives the title of the post from the permalink. For example, this is how I started this post: $ ./new.sh i-just-realised-something I don’t normally do clickbait titles. But in starting this post with such a title, I forgot what...

Converting a 64-bit integer to its decimal string representation is a mundane task that shows up everywhere: logging, JSON serialization, CSV output, debug prints, etc. In C++, you might use std::to_chars , sprintf , or some library routine. How do these functions work? At a high level, they repeatedly divide by ten. Start with your integer k . Divide it by ten, use the remainder as the last digit (it is between 0 and 9 inclusively). You then add the code point value of the character 0 to...

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a Linux distribution derived from Chimera Linux , and it’s now available for download. The distribution is called Casuarina Linux. It swaps out musl in Chimera for glibc to gain more binary compatibility with the wider GNU/Linux ecosystem. GNOME desktop on Casuarina Linux. Most of the heavy lifting was done by q66 in creating Chimera Linux. I used that excellent base to build C...

AI models are very capable and get more capable each year. So naturally people feel they’re underusing them. There’s a tweet that goes like: your laptop has a 100M USD startup in it, you just have to figure the right sequence of words to get it out. And beyond money, people imagine AI could boost them in every area of life. Thus all these perennial ideas: of an AI executive assistant, an AI tutor, an AI that curates your “digital garden”, an AI that (sigh) writes flashcards for you. T...

Tenfold is a quirky little stew of a project, touched by many hands. We put all ten kinds of design in it: visual design, user interface design, API design, and then the half-dozen known forms of “social” design — the design of creative constraints, personality, self-revealing functionality, false walls, sticky friction, and spite, seeping into every facet from DX to docs. Todd outlined the visual design , I’ll shade in the rest. Background: Todd tapped me for Tenfold in mid-November...